The Blackbird Diaries wins the Bookends Prize 2018

It is the second time Karen has had success at the awards,
having won the Striding Edge Productions Prize for Guides and
Places at the 2016 awards for her book The Gathering Tide (also published
by Saraband).

In The Blackbird
Diaries, Karen Lloyd shares her deep-rooted affection for all
our treasured garden wildlife.

Over the four seasons, she
intimately chronicles the drama and the joy, the perils and the
pleasures of the natural world as it all unfolds in her garden and
on her daily walks in the limestone hills and valleys of Cumbria's
South Lakeland.

What emerges is a
celebration of landscapes that rarely feature in the existing canon
of nature writing.

The winners of the 2018 Lakeland Book of the Year awards were
revealed at a special literary luncheon held in Cumbria on Tuesday
10 July.

Other winners included Phil Rigby's Portrait of Cumbria (CN Magazines), which
won Lakeland Book of the Year.

About the author

Karen Lloyd is a writer of non-fiction and poetry based in
Kendal, Cumbria. She is a contributor to the Guardian
Country Diary, has written for the Family section of the
Guardian and is a features writer for BBC Countryfile
Magazine. She contributes to a number of online blogs,
including Caught by the River. She is the editor of
Curlew Calling Anthology and works at both regional and
local levels on the urgent need for curlew restoration. Karen is a
member of Kendal's Brewery Poets and gained a distinction from the
Creative Writing M.Litt programme at Stirling University. Her first
book, The Gathering Tide, won a Lakeland Award and was
selected in the 2016 books of the year feature in the
Observer.

"This poetic book is a map, a layered account of Morecambe Bay,
its birds, rivers, names, bones, weathers, ghosts, tides and lives,
its dangerous beauty, its tragedies. In mapping a place and sharing
its beauty with her reader, she arrives at her own sense of
belonging." - Gillian Clarke, poet

"Slides effortlessly from the environment to history, to stories
of other people, to personal anecdote... [It] succeeds
magnificently." - Robin Lloyd-Jones, author of The Sunlit
Summit